Fire and Drums
by BlackRose
Summary: They're all that's left. All of the might of the Time Lords, everything of it that remains in all the universe, distilled down and contained in just two fragile bodies. *Sound of Drums/Last of the Time Lords*
1. Fire and Drums

The voice on the other end of the line turns low and serious, whispering into his ear with a familiarity that has nothing to do with the voice itself, so brash and new. "Where is it, Doctor?"

He makes himself swallow. He had thought it had grown easier, repetition of the telling blunting the taste of ash in his mouth, but it's all a lie; it doesn't get easier, it doesn't stop, and all the tellings before were only dry practice runs for this, the words falling on the only ears in all the universe that truly _know_ what he's saying. "Gone."

There are kilometers between them, bridged by satellite signal, electronic waves carried through hydrogen and oxygen and the turning of the planet around them, but through the tiny distant line he can still hear it. The voice bites the words off harshly and he can feel it, not just against his ear but in the thrum of his own hearts, his own helpless cry thrown back to him down the echo of a cel phone connection. "How can Gallifrey be _gone_?"

"It burnt," he whispers, and the words are ash in his mouth. Ash and fire. It isn't just the truth. It is the Truth, a truth beyond all truths. He closes his eyes when he says it, shutting away blue skies and green leaves and feeling the unchangeable truth of it in his very bones.

Gallifrey the mighty, the eternal, had burnt. Gallifrey's children had burnt. It is the truest of truths because it is _still_ true. Gallifry _is_ burning. Gallifrey's children are burning still and it is fire and ash in his mouth. Fire in his fingertips, where he clutches plastic and metal of the thin phone. Fire in his ears, where the sound of breathing echoes across the distance. Fire in his bones, in his hearts, clear to his feet that cleave to the endless tumbling turn of this small planet on which he stands. Fire in his veins, in his mind, sweeping through his thoughts. He burns with it, an endless inferno that heats every word, every gesture, burning him from the inside out with the cries of a whole world, a whole race, all of his people. They burn, eternal, and he burns with them, driven on and on by the endless inferno.

_They_ burn with them. Because he isn't alone now and he wants, desperately, insanely, to ask if the other feels it. Feels the fire, the heat, tastes the scorched air and the endless ash that will echo in their minds forever and ever. Gallifrey is gone. Only the idea of her remains, but someone once said that an idea would live forever, so long as someone remembered it. They both remember and so Gallifrey lives on, incandescent and shining, burning eternal through the last of her children with the weight of all eternity and the breadth of all space and time to fuel a fire that will never ever die so long as either of them draws breath.

They haven't stood properly in the same room yet. Haven't breathed the same air, haven't stood toe to toe in the flesh. Already the fire leaps across the kilometers between them, burning, burning, and he wonders, dimly, where the fire burns inside and he can never stop thinking, never just _stop_, if those flames, brought that close one to the other, would go up in an endless inferno that would never cease.

They're all that's left. All of the might of the Time Lords, everything of it that remains in all the universe, distilled down and contained in just two fragile bodies. Pure essence of all that remains of Gallifrey, polar opposites in perpetual binary orbit, two ordinary stars flared into supernovas burning bright and hot with the fuel of their entire race. There is only one star mapped out on the blackness behind his closed eyes where there used to be all the bright glittering wealth of a universe of stars, but he's been a beggar too long, grown used to the utterness of pitch blackness. That single star burns brighter than whole galaxy clusters to him, blinding and brilliant in the void, and he can feel the fire in himself burn the brighter for it.

"Can't you _hear_ it?" the voice whispers to him and yes, yes he can hear it, the fire licking through every word with vibrating energy that throbs in every syllable that tumbles through that distant mouth. "I thought it would stop but it never does, it never ever does. The drumming, Doctor, the constant _drumming_."

_Yes_, he wants to say. Yes, he can hear it, but it isn't drumming. It's the crackle of fire. Can't you feel it? Can't you feel the burning?

Fire and drums, burning and beating, and the other may say it's too late but it isn't his choice to decide - the fire and drums are already there, beneath their skin, threaded indelibly through the double beat of their hearts, and it's all there is, the last breathing moment of which they are the last embodiment and it will never, _ever_, stop.


	2. Relentless

"So it came to pass," he says, quiet, jovial, as though sharing a secret joke, "that the human race fell and the earth was no more." He smiles, brilliant, and beyond the windows the skies fall, open up and rain death and destruction upon the earth below, and the shoulder caught beneath his hand trembles. "And I looked down upon my new dominion," he continues, the laughter welling up through his stomach to nestle tight and warm underneath his ribs, "as Master of it all and I thought it... _good_."

The Earth is burning before their eyes, the blue skies tinted in the red of flames and the black ink smudges of smoke. He has done this, he has created it, but it's nothing. Beneath his smile, beneath the momentary burst as he first unleashed it, he can already feel it fading. The bright fireworks through his mind are dimming, the electric sparks dwindling away, and without them there is only... there is...

He looks away from what he's wrought to study the face of the man beside him. Old skin, paper thin, creased by a hundred unnatural years but what is a hundred to a man who has more than nine times that to his name? The eyes are undimmed and it is the eyes he watches, the dark burn in their depths that is the eternal storm. Beyond the Doctor's other shoulder his own pretty Lucy is rapt, wide eyes still fixed on the view, her mouth curved in a little 'oh' of fascination, but it is the dry, withered lips of the man beside him that captures his attention, drawn back in a grimace over clenched teeth.

"Can you hear it?" he whispers, needing to know. The first fireworks are dim embers now and when the fireworks cease it comes back, always comes back, his constant unwavering companion. It thrums in his mind, in his thoughts, in his bones. "The drums. The constant, _constant_ beating." _Ta-ta-ta-Tum, ta-ta-ta-Tum._ He beats it out unconsiously, fingers slave to the rhythm, tapping it into the shoulder beneath his grasp. It's been a lifetime and more since anything has drowned them out for more than the briefest spark of a guttering candle, until he can't recall what silence is, if he ever knew. Insistant, constant, like the beating of a universal heart.

It's been a lifetime and more since they stood like this, shoulder to shoulder, and who would have thought? Alpha and Omega, the beginning and end, and they are all that is left. It's fitting that things should end when they come together; they are, between them, the killers of worlds. But he's always thought it nicer to have a personal touch, so the Doctor's precious Earth burns as they watch, together once more.

He shifts his hand, fingers sliding out to touch papery skin and the soft, thin wisps of bone white hair that cling stubbornly above the collar. _Ta-ta-ta-Tum_ It thrums through his fingers, deep in the bones like an itch he can't scratch, driving him restlessly on. "Can you hear it, _Doctor_?" he whispers, and those dark, bleak eyes flicker to him.

He smiles, the mask slipping back into place with the effortless ease of practice, the deep beating thrum nipping at his heels. "Not bad for a first date, wouldn't you say? I'm sorry I didn't get you flowers. Thoughtless of me."

The mask wavers and he has to go with it, tumble with it, tapdancing across the brittle crust of broken lava flow that never slows, never stops. The drums are beating, beating, driving him on. "But I did take you to the symphony." He leans his head closer, almost cheek to cheek, where the cool air of Gallifrey is resurrected in the space between their skin. "All those screams, and the drums, the _drums_. This is the shape of things to come, Doctor. Can you hear it? Can you? This is the sound of war."

"No." It is so low, so faint, that he can barely hear it but he maps the sound in the movement of those thin dry lips.

He reaches up to press a finger to them, like a mother shutting away words with a gentle, knowing shake of her head. "Yes," he says, softly, chiding. "Too late for that now."

He breathes a soft kiss against papery skin, lips brushing the wrinkled drape of a sagging cheek. "You'll see," he whispers. "You'll _see_." And then, because he needs to know, must know, "you _can_ hear it, can't you?"

The head beneath his grasp twists and he meets dark eyes, where the heart of the storm lurks in the blackness and the pounding is in his hearts now, in his breath, in his lungs, in every fiber of his being, relentless and unstoppable. _Ta-ta-ta-Tum, ta-ta-ta-Tum._

"It isn't drums," his oldest rival breathes in a voice of dry reeds and bleached bones shivering in the wind. "It's _fire_."

The truest names are never those you give yourself but the ones other people give you. He has been called Evil, and the man at his side has been hailed as the Oncoming Storm. For one moment, one doubled heartbeat, he stands outside himself and watches them, the embodiments, the devil and the storm, gazes meeting in unspoken communion through the paltry eyes of two lost men, the last remnants of all that they are.

"So be it," he whispers, breathless. Leaning up, he presses his lips to there the skin stretches thin over the curve of the skull above the other man's brow. The drums beat beneath his fingers, caught in the pulse of a withered throat, and he has heard them so long, felt them for so very long, that it takes him endless moments to realize that it isn't the drums at all but only the proper beat of two hearts in syncopation within one chest. _Ta-tum-ta-tum, ta-tum-ta-tum_

He touches a cheek and in a real sense he's crafted this too, all of it, every bit, from the feel of skin beneath his fingertips to the black fire in the eyes that watch him and the unceasing tremble in the body beside his own. "So be it," he repeats, gently, soothing. "Let it be fire and we'll burn together. Us and _all_ the worlds."


End file.
